The Man of Iron

by Richard Dehan

LXVII

Meanwhile, the Man of Iron had commented to Hatzfeldt:

"Our landlady is going for a little promenade ... she does not fear damp, that is quite plain ... see how she trails her skirts over the wet grass. Now, if she were to show her feet, should we be grateful, or the reverse?"

A light of cynical amusement flickered in his blue eyes as he noted Hatzfeldt's disgust of the creature of whom he spoke. He went on:

"Ugly women have sometimes pretty feet, and hands that are exquisite. Have you ever looked closely at the hands of Madame Charles? If not, I recommend them to your notice. They are well worth looking at." He added, ignoring the shudder that convulsed the dandy: "I propose that we follow her—discreetly and at a distance. I have still a few minutes before the Mayor arrives."

He led the way. They crossed a portion of the lawn and turned into a gravel walk, damp and miry and drifted over with wet and rotting leaves. The shining patent-leather boots of Hatzfeldt suffered by their contact. The Chancellor, observing this, said:

"Never mind.... You can have them cleaned! My man Niederstedt polishes boots capitally!"

Hatzfeldt returned plaintively:

"I can have them cleaned, as Your Excellency observes. But never again will they be the same after a wetting. And they are made by the only man in the world who knows how to make boots."

The Minister said brutally:

"Order another pair of the fellow!"

Hatzfeldt returned with a shrug and a rueful look:

"He lives in Paris—Rue de Lafayette. And Your Excellency is going to have Paris bombarded!"

Said Bismarck, his great frame shaken by internal laughter:

"The fellows who write the newspaper articles out of their own heads know a great deal better than that.... According to them, I am a humanitarian—altruistic to imbecility."

"But we, who only write to Your Excellency's dictation, know Your Excellency better than they!"

The injury to his immaculate foot coverings, and the impending destruction of his bootmaker's establishment, incensed Hatzfeldt to the point of an imprudent retort.

The granite face turned. The heavy regard rested upon him. With his characteristic stutter—a signal as warning to those who knew him as the rattle of the crotalus hidden in the brake, the Minister said:

"So I am not a philanthropist, or a—or an apostle of light and sweetness. I would prefer to build an Empire with the fallen towers of the modern Babylon?..."

Hatzfeldt bowed with the grace inherited from the Russian Princess, his mother. The Minister went on in a lighter tone:

"As a boy, I always preferred the apples that hung on the highest branches. They were bigger and sweeter and rosier than the others, though in stealing them I risked both my breeches and my neck. Well! To be plain, there are two apples just now that I particularly covet: the Bombardment—and the Proclamation of the Emperor of Germany from the Tuileries...." He added: "The via media is not the surest road to an arrangement that shall be lasting. The most convincing arguments are uttered by the iron mouths of big guns!"

They had emerged from the shrubbery at the bottom of the garden. The patch of green still spread upon the eastern boundary wall, where the water trickled down. The aquatic plants had been weeded, and the tiny pond cleaned out by Breagh under the supervision of his Infanta, but the pipe remained unsoldered because the plumber's men had gone to the War. Thus the Satyr's mouth remained dry, though the chuckle still sounded in the Satyr's throat.

Madame Charles had been standing near the mask as the Minister and his courtly First Secretary stepped into the open. She started slightly, glanced round, bent her head, and limped painfully away.

Said the Chancellor, barely glancing after the awkward, misshapen figure:

"I hope that it has not occurred to Madame Charles to look over the garden wall!"

Hatzfeldt's eyebrows went up in mild surprise. He objected:

"It would hardly be possible. The wall must be eight feet high, and how in the world could a woman, elderly and with that distressing deformity——"

The laugh that shook the great figure beside him puzzled as much as the utterance.

"She is a daughter of Eve—and it would be possible, by putting a toe in the jaws of yonder grinning gentleman, to ascertain that I have had two sentries posted on the other side of this wall. Listen!..."

He rapped on the masonry with the walking stick he habitually carried, and an answering rap came from the other side.

"There is a good large garden there, belonging to an unoccupied house," he added. "And ranged along the wall are bushes, behind which my two men stand well screened."

"Did Your Excellency apprehend danger from that quarter?" inquired Hatzfeldt.

"Hardly," said he, "though it is as well to be on the safe side, and Versailles is pretty well packed with people by whom I am rather particularly detested. But as a fact, I placed the soldiers for the purpose of catching Madame's postman. You did not perceive as we stepped out of the shrubbery that she slipped an envelope into this creature's mouth?"

Hatzfeldt answered, in some astonishment:

"Why, no, Your Excellency. I saw nothing of the kind!"

The Minister said, shaken with the internal, secret laughter:

"And yet you have good eyes, better than mine for seeing some things at a distance.... A pretty face behind a thick veil ... a graceful figure concealed by a shawl. Possibly the friend who communicates with Madame Charles with the aid of this grinning fellow admires her.... There is no accounting for tastes...."

Hatzfeldt asked in a tone of disgust:

"Who is Madame Charles's friend? Is it possible that misshapen creature has a lover?"

The Minister answered with a curious grimace:

"A lover who is apparently a Franc-tireur."

Hatzfeldt returned with acrimony:

"One of those marauding free shooters who wear a black cloth uniform, and carry a black standard with a skull above a pair of crossbones. Perhaps his lady-love sat for the picture of the Death's head?"

The Minister returned, with a look of amusement:

"Possibly she did.... Though there have been moments when, under Madame's extraordinary coiffure with the black lace lappets, I have seen peeping at me—imagine what?"

"I cannot imagine.... Hatred, possibly?" said Hatzfeldt.

"Hatred, blazing from two extraordinarily blue eyes...." The Minister went on: "But not only hatred.... Youth, and prettiness. Now, look here, and—for I am perfectly convinced that you believe me bewitched by our landlady—behold my rival's billet-doux!.."

Hatzfeldt could scarcely speak for laughter. The Minister put his hand into the Satyr's mouth and extracted therefrom a little envelope, inscribed in a bold, black, inky scrawl.

"To My Adored Wife."

The Satyr chuckled almost humanly as the Minister held the superscription under his Secretary's eyes, and calmly proceeded to open the envelope.... Hatzfeldt, at first crimson, and writhing with repressed merriment, became graver as the Minister read aloud:

"What of thy husband? dost thou ask in the nights that are sleepless and solitary. Credit, my little one, that thy Charles is often near. In the thought of thy husband, if not in person, he rests upon thy heart so faithful and fond."

Hatzfeldt spluttered. The reader continued:

"We Francs-tireurs attacked a squadron of Schleswig Hussars the other day at the village of Hably.... We shot down many of the Prussian marauders and killed their horses. Only eleven escaped with life. They returned later and burned the village, committing unexampled brutalities, and murdered several of the inhabitants. It is well! We have another cause to feed our roaring furnace of hate.

"All means of revenge are good, for ours is a holy war waged upon a merciless invader. We number nobles, peasants, citizens, criminals in our armed and organized ranks. Each man will kill as he knows best. The rifle, the knife, the scythe, or the cudgel, the gardener's shears, the chemist's drugs, and the barber's razor are weapons lawful to be used against the enemies of France. We will dig wolf-traps for these Prussian foes of ours, who plunder by method and wreck scientifically. We will tumble them down wells, drown them in rivers, burn the huts they are sleeping in over their heads. And our sisters?—our wives? They are united with us in our solemn compact of destruction. They will embrace to strangle. They will smile and stab! They will cook savory dishes for Messieurs les Prussiens, and the dogs will eat of them and die.

"These kisses on thy sweetest eyelids. These for thy two little hands. Dost thou love me? Till death and after,

"Thine and thine only,
"Charles Tessier."

There was a silence. The Minister broke it with a grim sentence:

"When this fine fellow is not murdering Prussians, he is making love to his spitfire of a wife. A fine breed of young criminals should spring from such a union!"

The Satyr's mocking chuckle sounded like a comment on the speech. The Minister had deftly opened the envelope without tearing the flap, which was still moist. He now refolded and slipped back the sheet into the envelope, wet his finger in the little jet that gurgled from the hole in the pipe behind the mask of the Satyr, and reclosed the envelope. He drew out his watch and consulted it, as the clocks of Versailles struck the half hour, and said to Hatzfeldt, replacing the watch:

"Half-past twelve.... Do you know, I read something by Félix Pyat very like this"—he slightly waved the drying envelope—"in a copy of the Petit Journal that was brought me the other day.... Now, my Mayor is due, and M. Thiers is certain to arrive on his heels.... I must return to the house; but I should prefer that you stayed here."

"Here, Excellency!"

The Minister laughed in the amazed face of the Secretary.

"I want you," he said, "to play the part of Leporello.... Frankly, I cannot understand why Madame Charles herself placed this letter in the gape of the mask.... I am curious to know who will fetch it away from there.... I am going to ask you to hide in the shrubbery and find out."

Hatzfeldt glanced dubiously at the wall. The Minister nodded.

"My two men are not sufficiently sharp-eyed to see through these bricks. Really, I must ask you to stay here and oblige me. Von Keudell must keep M. Thiers in play instead of you.... Why, you are quite pale!..."

Hatzfeldt gulped and admitted:

"That letter gave me an unpleasant sensation. I am regularly shaved by a Frenchman, you understand!... And these Francs-tireurs seem to be everywhere. Really, it is horrible!"

The Minister's brow became thunderous. The lines about his mouth hardened to granite. He said in his grimmest tone:

"They should be hanged whenever found! And not cut down, but left hanging, for a salutary warning to other rascals.... Do you know that the Combat—the organ edited by that blackguard Félix Pyat—wishes to get up a subscription for the purchase of a gold-mounted rifle to be given to the scoundrel who succeeds in removing the Prussian King.' ... Doubtless they have set their price upon the heads of Moltke, and the arch enemy Bismarck. Well—Auf Wiedersehen! Ride out with me after lunch to the aqueduct of Marly, and tell me what I want to know."

And the great figure strode away, leaving the First Secretary to his unwelcome task.

"After lunch..." he said mentally, as he insinuated his graceful figure between a lilac and a lauristinus, and the rich soil, rendered marshy by the overflow of the lily pool, squashily gave way beneath his once immaculate boots. "Why, good Heaven!... the woman to whom that monstrous epistle was addressed actually assists the Foreign Office chef with the cooking! The Chief swears by her ragoûts and her omelettes and her beignets. They are certainly excellent.... I must avoid them for the future. A young married man with a family must be careful. I wonder, if anything unpleasant happened, whether Touti would marry again?"

The bushes were wet with rain. Little cold showers sprinkled the dandy's head and shoulders. His boots sank deeper as the wet trickled down his neck. What a degrading task for a First Diplomatic Secretary! With what shrieks of laughter his lively American Countess would read his written description of his experiences as a spy! A corn began to shoot. He sneezed. This meant influenza to a certainty. Even while he devoted Madame Charles, her bloodthirsty spouse, and all her countrymen to the hottest corner of Tophet, he kept a bright lookout. And in another five minutes or so he saw the person for whom he lay in waiting coming down the mossy gravel path that wound through the shrubbery.

It was Jean Jacques, the clumsy foot boy, whose mistakes and blunders kept the Prussian Chancery attendants in a continual eruption of abusive German epithets, and whose patois, proclaimed to be Swiss, was so extremely puzzling that Hatzfeldt, who had piqued himself upon an exclusive knowledge of the French of the Tyrol, could only assign the youth to a canton of his own. He thrust his hand into the Satyr's toothed gape and pulled out the letter, twisted a wry mug as he regarded it, and said, with an admirable English accent:

"Oh, damn!..."

Then, at the urgent tinkle of a bell from the kitchen regions, he thrust the missive into the pocket of his striped cotton jacket and scampered back to the house.

You will remember that when Juliette had consented to marry the unknown Charles Tessier, she had, for her dear Colonel's very sake, adorned the faceless one with features, a complexion, shoulders, muscles, and so on. She had even boasted to Monica's brother of the swordsmanship of the worthy but unromantic young cloth manufacturer, whose most sportsmanlike accomplishment was the shooting of thrushes and sparrows, which he would bring home to the Rue de Provence in triumph, to be converted by his adoring mother into savory pies.

Now, during these days of tension and anxiety, perhaps to relieve the strain of an otherwise unbearable situation—possibly with the desire of inflicting on her unfortunate adorer the torturing pangs of jealousy, or possibly to create and maintain in herself a fictitious interest in the supposititious husband, she had begun anew to expatiate upon his gifts and graces, and, having begun, could not leave off. Her Charles had not red hair and yellow gray eyes, a blunt nose, and a square chin with a dent in it. He was pale, with melancholy black eyes and a high brow. His jetty mustache was waxed, his imperial finished in a point of the most elegant.... He quoted poetry in a deep voice, and was capable of torrential outbursts of passion. He was altogether a perfect specimen of the type of Balzac's beautiful young man.

Surfeited with these perfections, P. C. Breagh had become restive, to the point, one day, of being clumsily sarcastic on the immunity of widows' only sons from the obligation of military service, and so on.

That afternoon Madame Charles had received a mysterious communication to the effect that her lord had secretly quitted Belgium, penetrated in disguise into France, passed through the Prussian lines in a series of hairbreadth escapes, and joined a corps of Francs-tireurs. Since when, letters containing tirades inspired by the most flaming patriotism, sanguinary descriptions of adventure, and passionate protestations of devotion, had been found at intervals by Madame Charles in the mouth of the Satyr mask. Of late, since she had developed nervousness about fetching the letters herself, Jean Jacques had sulkily performed the office. And when she did not, with due precautions, declaim these effusions for the benefit of her victim and fellow conspirator, his was the task—inconceivably repulsive to a young man suffering the stabs of jealousy, of reading them aloud to Madame Charles. Hence the expletive which had betrayed his British nationality to Count Hatzfeldt, standing disconsolate in his squelching patent leathers under the dripping lilac and syringa trees.